cheesburger jerry

‘Big C’ makes for more patient Plaza panhandler'

Kansas City’s most prolific panhandler is coming to terms with his own mortality …

Jerry Mazer — a Plaza pariah to some, an institution to others — has cancer.

“The doctor says I’ve got two years to 20 to live, so I figure I’ve got 10 years,” Mazer says. “That’s a helluva estimate, isn’t it?”

Mazer procured a note from his doc to evidence his condition.

“To whom it may concern,” the note begins on what appears to be a Truman Medical Center prescription form that lists his name, payment terms and date of birth (06-09-50). “Gerald Mazer, patient under my care, cannot work. He was recently diagnosed with leukemia.”

Still Mazer must make a living, so he maintains his vigil.

“I’m doing fine,” he says. “It’s almost been a year since I was diagnosed, but I’m doing fine. I’m trying to stay out of trouble — the cops pretty much have been leaving me alone ....”

The end game for Mazer?

“For me? D-E-A-T-H. That’s between seven and 10 years now if I’m lucky. You never know because it’s up to God.”

Has his philosophy on life changed?

“I’m trying to be nicer and crack jokes,” Mazer says. “I don’t even think about the death sentence. But it’s changed my philosophy about how I want to be right with God and right with people, where I’m not a bad guy, so maybe I can go to heaven.

“Like yesterday I asked somebody for a down payment on a cheeseburger, and I got no results. So then I asked somebody for a down payment on a hippie-burger, and he called the cops and said I called him a hippie mother-(something). It didn’t sit too well with the cops, but they let me get out of here.”

Mazer’s lawyer extricated him in May from a jam, “for cussing out a Plaza security guard,” Mazer says. “But that was from October of last year, and I haven’t been arrested since.”

It’s like this: Some people resent being asked for money and will say some nasty stuff. In Mazer’s “Screaming Jerry” days in Westport back in the 1980s and early ’90s, he more than returned verbal fire.

Recently he’s been more restrained but still feisty. But the “Big C” has further calmed the once-petulant panhandler.

“It’s better to be humble than to go to jail, because if somebody calls the cops, no matter what happened, I’m the one who gets in trouble,” Mazer says. “Make sure you put my diagnosis in the paper, that way maybe people won’t be so mean to me.”

Done deal.

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